THE MONKEY [2025]

The Monkey (2025)
Directed by: Osgood Perkins
Written by: Osgood Perkins, Stephen King
Starring: Christian Convery, Colin O'Brien, Tatiana Maslany, Theo James

USA  

IN CINEMAS NOW

RUNNING TIME: 97 mins

REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera

Petey Shelburn is desperate to destroy an organ grinder monkey that plays a drum, but after a shopkeeper is mysteriously killed right in front of him, he instead flees and abandons his twin boys Hal and Bill to their mother Lois, who’s hardly a responsible parent. Hal becomes a victim of bullying, much of it from the dominating Bill. When the two find the monkey in the house, it soon becomes apparent that turning its key will cause someone to die. After some terrible incidents, the obvious thing is to dismantle and destroy the monkey, but this becomes curiously difficult. 25 years later, Hal is preparing to spend his yearly time with his estranged son, also called Petey, but is confronted by the return of both his brother and the monkey….

Well it’s really all about the deaths. The Monkey may certainly have a plot, but it’s easy to forget that when you just know that you’re going to get a spectacular and amusing death in a few minutes – well, as long as you find such scenes amusing in the first place. A horror fan for nearly four decades, beginning when I was far too young to see much of the stuff that I did, and when my motto was “the gorier the better”, my old gore hound leanings haven’t exactly gone away but, as I get older, I have no problem with kills being presented in total seriousness and as horribly as possible, but I find less enjoyment in filmmakers trying to get us to chuckle and cheeer at folk dying. And that’s largely what The Monkey, described by a friend as being a melding of Wish Upon and a Final Destination sequel, does, relegating everything else secondary, and simplifying matters so much that it doesn’t even bother to tell us much about its menace; don’t expect even a whiff of interesting lore to show up in writer / director Osgood [son of Anthony] Perkins’s expansion of a Stephen King short story. And don’t also expect any of the superbly maintained uneasy tension of Perkins’s previous work Longlegs which really seemed to show Perkins having developed as a strong filmmaker. While there are certainly serious themes and attempts at human interest. this film is mostly interested in the next so-called laugh [i.e. a woman being electrocuted in a swimming pool and exploding, a severed arm flying towards the person observing said electrocution]. This of course is fine if that’s what you’re most interested in, but it’s also possible to find this approach cheap and crass, and seriously undermining the fear element which is surely most important?

Anyway, let’s set aside that discussion for now, though I’ll return to it later seeing as it’s what this film does more than anything else. We open with a prologue set in 1999 where a shopkeeper is pestered by a man coming into his shop who wants to destroy the drum-playing monkey that resides among the many and diverse antiques in his shop. His fearful words make no sense to the shopkeeper, and then the monkey plays its drums, and a chain reaction causes the shop owner to be killed with a harpoon gun, a long intestinal string being launched across the shop – which certainly lets us know what this film is going to be like. Petey has twin sons; Hal and Bill. Our narrator, an adult Hal [who’s heard so often in the first third that it eventually becomes annoying though it does eventually stop], tells us that his dad disappeared, leaving his mum Lois to raise him and Bill. Years later in 1999, we see the boys discover the monkey in a closet containing their father’s belongings and wind its key. Later that evening, the monkey begins drumming while they are at dinner, triggering the accidental decapitation of their babysitter Annie. Another death already – when surely we could have done with more establishing of environment and character before the next kill? Even the great slashers, from Halloween to Scream, tend to take their time after the opening atrocity and allow suspense to build. We do get a fairly good sense of the relationship between Hal and Bill, Bill considering himself superior because he was born three hours earlier, thinking that this gives him the right to bully and control Hal, who’s also being bullied at school by a group of girls.

However, eventually Bill’s bullying of Hal pushes him too far and prompts him to turn the monkey’s key again, hoping that it’ll kill his brother. Instead, somebody else suffers a sudden aneurysm and dies right in front of Bill, in a rare death scene that doesn’t seem to be presented comically. And the following scene in church, during the funeral, is actually rather good too. The priest is trying hard to make the death not seem a particularly bad thing, and, while some may uncomfortably chuckle at this, I imagine that this is one of the most difficult things that a priest might have to do, and the film is honest enough to keep cutting to audience members not at all being cheered up by this. I think the balance between seriousness and humour [if you want to find humour here] is well achieved in this scene. Overcome with guilt, Hal dismantles and disposes of the monkey before he and his brother move to Maine to live with their aunt Ida and somewhat inappropriate uncle Chip, quite memorably played by Perkins himself even though he’s not in it much.  However, the monkey mysteriously reappears at their new home. Realising its power, Bill, despite Hal’s protests, tests it, and somebody else dies shortly after in a way I won ‘t describe; if you do like this sort of thing, you’ll find it both funny and inventive so I don’t want to ruin the surprise. The brothers decide to seal it in its box and throw it down a nearby well, hoping that it will remain hidden. Now we cut to25 years later, and Hal is estranged from both his brother and his son Petey, whom he sees only once a year out of fear that the monkey will return and kill Petey if Hal’s too much in his life. Hal learns that his ex-wife and her new husband plan to adopt Petey fully. Another tragic yet also apparently funny family death causes Bill to call Hal,  claiming that he’s suspicious that the monkey has returned and someone has been turning the key.

Who could it be? To be fair, the plotting really isn’t bad, even though I guessed one major revelation a few minutes before it was revealed. And there are one or two daft elements in the story that will surely become apparent to many viewers as they digest what they’ve just seen, not to mention some just plain vagueness. Early on, we learn that the monkey requires human activation to kill, yet it also seems to be able to do things on its own, such as teleport. While some background detail regarding the monkey would have certainly helped the film, I rather like the fact that Osgood seems content to give us no background on his villain whatsoever. It’s almost a refreshing change to not get a scene where a character is introduced primarily to provide some exposition. And as director Osgood does his best to present the monkey in as sinister a way as he can, with lots of closeups of his drum-banging and his mouth when it’s become an evil grin. Why drum-banging, you might ask, when such monkeys usually bang cymbals? Well according to Perkins, this change was made because the film’s producers – who include James Wan – believed that Disney owned the rights to the cymbal-banging version of the toy on the basis of its appearance in Toy Story 3. This sounds rather daft to me, but then this is Disney that we’re talking about.

Trauma and the importance of familial connections are of course common themes these days, but, in between all the scenes of people getting trampled on, exploding, dismembered etc. we do just about care about Hal’s plight. This is helped immensely by the nicely shaded performance of Theo James, who’s just as good as Bill which is possibly the more difficult role. It’s hard to sometimes believe that the same actor is playing both parts and the digital trickery here is seamless. The gory special effects are fine too, combining CGI with practical work, but intended for us to laugh at more than be actually shocked by, which becomes deadening and even insulting. Things finish on a surprisingly and admirably grim and large-scale note [you won’t forget the image of a woman pushing a pram with fire coming out of it], followed by a touch of poetry – then end on yet another grisly laugh that partly makes a mockery of what’s come immediately before. Nonetheless, for the sake of balance, I’m happy to counter my uneasiness with endless deaths presented as jokes with a quote from Perkins himself. “They had a very serious script. Very serious. I felt it was too serious, and I told them: ‘This doesn’t work for me. The thing with this toy monkey is that the people around it all die in insane ways. So, I thought: Well, I’m an expert on that.’ Both my parents died in insane, headline-making ways. I spent a lot of my life recovering from tragedy, feeling quite bad. It all seemed inherently unfair. You personalise the grief: ‘Why is this happening to me?’ But I’m older now and you realise this shit happens to everyone. Everyone dies. Sometimes in their sleep, sometimes in truly insane ways, like I experienced. But everyone dies. And I thought maybe the best way to approach that insane notion is with a smile”. So there you go, but that doesn’t mean that his film still wouldn’t have been much better if we’d been able to have a strong amount of dread.

Perkins gives us more rural settings bleakly photographed by cinematographer Nico Aguilar, and another often scary score by Edo Van Breeman who likes to have the music swell before being suddenly cut off. Aesthetically The Monkey is quite pleasing, and keeping things in mystery has its benefits. But, while many will find the approach makes for great entertainment, it’s also possible to find said approach glib and lazy.